On an ancestry website he has learned of a half-sister he never knew existed. Her second marriage was a happy one, but when her husband died of cancer she found her life empty and at sea. He is an interior man, impossible to penetrate when he turns inside himself. He remarried two more times both wives left him for much the same reason as Lucy did. It is the design of Strout’s entire novel, itself designed to unearth the past while interring the present in fits and starts. And yes, the reader knows exactly how it is. Lucy hesitates, backtracks, stumbles forward, gazes around the room too. You start a conversation with one person and another person comes along and you have to interrupt yourself, and then you see their eyes looking around the room as you talk-you know how it is.” “The apartment was filled with people, although not as many as I might have thought, but it makes me nervous, that kind of thing. Early in Oh William!, writing about a party she once attended, Lucy’s reverie perfectly captures her unique voice, her manner of flitting among subjects and objects. One exchange reminds her of another, and another, and another. Her mind stutters back and forth between events. Lucy Barton narrates her relationship with her ex-husband like any one of us might muse and speculate about past mistakes and misunderstandings. What I treasured in Oh William! is the point of view. It includes references to the other books that add texture to its story, but it also draws the reader into the here and now in utterly compelling ways. Oh William! wholly succeeds as a stand-alone novel. When Sunny asked me to review Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Oh William! I wondered “why me?” I haven’t read Strout’s two other books in her Amgash series, My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible, so I would be coming to Oh William! with no prior knowledge of Lucy and her companions and what had previously occurred in their lives. Oh William! – Strout’s Lucy Barton is back in a stand-alone novel of depth and texture, drawing the reader into a compelling story of past and present.

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